Everything Is Not Okay
by OddEnthusiasms
Summary: Future!Fic. When Angela and Jack's daughter is kidnapped, they end up fighting time, and each other. Angst alert. Oneshot. Xposted to LJ. R&R!


**A/N:** Because my friend Kimber wanted me to write something along these lines. Rating only for language and mature situations. Also, OMG longest fic ever. I am a feedback whore!  
**Disclaimer:** Don't own 'em.

Everything Is Not Okay

Most women settle for merely having their husbands acknowledge their ninth anniversary without reminding. Angela was needlessly among these women. Jack had been warning her for weeks to keep her evening free, and had even arranged for a baby-sitter himself. Their dinner was romantic, quiet, and memorable. Over the years, their reckless passion may have diminished slightly, but their deep love had grown only stronger.

Jack dawdled at the front door upon their return home, hanging up Angela's coat while she went to offer the sitter a drive home. He'd only stepped into the main hallway when his wife's shrill scream came from the TV room. When he arrived at her side, she was kneeling on the floor, at the side of the university student they'd employed for the evening.

"Blunt force trauma to the skull. She's unconscious," Angela diagnosed, her voice quavering.

"Call an ambulance," Jack told her instinctively, even as she was reaching for the chordless phone on the coffee table. While she stood, punching the three buttons with shaking hands, he grabbed the nearest heavy object - a small antique statue - and began his examination of the ground floor of the house. He would contact the security company he dealt with afterwards, right now, he was a man protecting his family.

Angela made her way upstairs while she waited for an operator. The phone dropped from her hand when she came to the first bedroom. It was empty. "Jack!"

* * *

Angela was crushing his hands in her anxious grip, but Jack figured it was a good thing. Otherwise, what would keep him from strangling the police officer sitting opposite them? Just as Detective Idiot was asking, for the third time, their daughter's height, another man entered the room and flashed the officers his FBI badge.

"Booth," Angela greeted, standing up to give him a hug, no doubt leaving tear-stains on his jacket.

"Since when do you work kidnappings?" Jack came off rude without meaning to.

"Since the child kidnapped happens to be the daughter of some of my closest friends," Booth replied gravely, releasing Angela from his arms. "Brennan met up with Zach outside," he told her, "they should be in any minute now."

Angela nodded. "I think I'll go find them."

Booth shooed the officer away and took his position on the loveseat. "I'm sorry, Hodgins," he said.

"If you're really sorry, you'll find the bastard that took Melena."

"I promise you I will."

Jack nodded, then put his face in his hands, letting his posture droop. "Angela and Melena are the two most important things in my life, Booth. Seeing Angela like this, and not being able to tell her for sure that everything will be okay, not knowing where our little girl is, it's just killing me."

"Be strong," Booth said, trying to be both professional and sincere at once. "And everything will be okay, you can promise Angela that for me."

* * *

She used to pride herself on her ability to focus her emotions towards something productive under bad circumstances. Tonight, Angela could manage nothing but tears. Every so often, Brennan or someone else would come into Angela and Jack's bedroom, to check on her. Every time, she would ask for news, receive none, and ask them to leave. The productive thing to do, she knew, would have been to go back downstairs and work with the others to find whom ever had taken her precious Melena. But she was too distraught to be productive, so she left the investigation to Jack, Booth, and the others.

The horrible feeling in her stomach obviously wasn't from the delicious dinner that seemed so long ago. It was the feeling that she was failing as a mother. Her daughter was missing, and she could do nothing but sob into the thousand dollar pillow shams. She also felt like a horrible wife. Jack would be angry and upset, and she'd hardly said a dozen things to him since they'd gotten home.

Angela was trying to make herself get out of bed when the door opened. She was just about to dismiss her company without asking for the update that wouldn't exist anyway, when she recognised the silhouette.

Jack set his suit jacket on the bureau before wordlessly climbing into the bed with Angela. She rolled over, into his arms, and he held her.

"This is the worst," she said, her voice muffled both by tears and the fabric of his shirt, "This horrible feeling of knowing someone you love has been taken from you - maybe only for a few hours, maybe forever - but not knowing where they are, or what you can possibly do to save them."

"It'll be okay, Ange. In no time at all, Melena will be home, safe, and who ever took her will be punished, and life will go back to normal."

She pulled away to look at him in the dim light. "Were our lives ever really all the normal?"

"What I meant was, 'back to as normal as ours could ever be'," Jack said, grinning a grin that didn't reach his eyes.

Angela laughed once. "That isn't all that normal, Jack."

"Normal is over-rated."

"As is love?"

"No, normal is over-rated _all_ of the time. Love is only over-rated most of the time." His grin was a bit more genuine this time.

She smiled sadly. "Love is the cause of all this."

"It is. Both the good and the bad."

Tears welled again in Angela's eyes. "I'm really worried about her."

Jack tightened his arms around her, pulling her back to him. "I know you are, baby, but everything will be okay." He tried his best to follow Booth's advice.

"I don't know what I'd do if anything happened to her."

He felt tears stinging his own eyes and let them fall. Strong be damned. "Neither do I, so let's hope nothing bad does."

* * *

"_Dr. and Mrs. Hodgins, we have your daughter. She is safe - for now. Expect another phone call in twelve hours._" Even when the scrambled voice wasn't playing over the speakers in the study - where Angela had thrown her heart and soul into trying to clean the audio file up on her computer - it still ran through Jack's head. The call had come shortly after three AM, giving Angela the resolve she needed to get out of bed and sending Booth and his team on a frantic search for the caller. It was now four, and no progress had been made. Unless progress counted Angela's sarcastic remark that she would have to start wearing a name tag for her surname.

"Would now be a good time to offer tea?" Suddenly, Zach was standing in the doorway. Both Angela and Jack looked at him with red-rimmed eyes.

"Tea?" Jack clarified.

Zach shrugged. "It's what my mom would have done."

When Jack made an angry noise and opened his mouth to respond, Angela covered his hand with hers and spoke first. "Tea would be good, Zach, thank you."

* * *

They'd hit a dead end. Tracing the call had found nothing, and Angela found nothing of use in the audio file. The crime scene unit had came and went, finding nothing of evidence but an expertly jimmied window. The baby-sitter was conscious, suffering a headache, and knowing nothing. And Zach had long ago ran out of his mother's calming techniques.

The last thing Jack wanted to do was admit that their only option was to wait for the next phone call. The ten hours since the first one had crept by slowly, and he didn't expect the last two to pass any quicker.

Pacing, - sitting felt too passive - he could watch the group in his living room easily. On the outskirts of the room, police and FBI specialists sat with their equipment, only talking to communicate with Booth and each other. Zach appeared to be in his own world, sitting uncomfortably on an over-sized chair, not speaking or moving. Brennan and Angela were sitting on the couch, sometimes talking, but mostly silent. Angela had changed out of her cocktail dress, but hadn't done anything with her hair and make-up. The result was eyeliner-streaked cheeks and a clip that held only half the hair it had hours ago.

The first time he'd ever seen Angela upset had been eleven years ago, mere days after he'd identified a skull as her boyfriend. The sight had broken his heart, and had been the first sign that he saw her as something other than the good-looking artist he worked with. Within months, the feeling was confirmed.

This time, her tears of despair hit him harder than ever. He felt like he should have done something to prevent what was happening, or at least be working harder to fix it. But nothing he did could make a difference. Not even words seemed to comfort Angela.

What he'd said to Booth had been true - out of the two things that mattered most to him in the world, one was missing and one was beyond consolation. And Jack was helpless.

* * *

The problem was unforeseen and possibly irrevocable. Money was not the issue with the ransom, time was. There's always a certain amount of time required to reach point B from point A. Time was something they weren't given enough of.

Angela seemed to lose all hope after the third phone call - the one telling them the drop had been a failure. She would no longer even listen to reason. Brennan was at her typical spot beside her on the couch, uttering reassurances.

"They have a lead now, Ange. It's only a matter of time before they find whoever took Melena," Brennan was saying.

"But the call said they would kill her. Kidnappers don't lie about stuff like that."

Jack finally stopped his pacing and came to stand behind his wife. "Everyone lies sometimes, Angela," he told her, beginning to rub circular patterns on her back.

Brennan took one of Angela's hands in hers and squeezed it. "Booth will find Mel before anything bad can happen to her."

"You don't know that," Angela argued weakly, shaking her head.

"Yes, I do."

"How?"

Brennan looked directly at Jack to answer. "Because I have faith in Booth."

* * *

Jack found Angela on the second level, leaning against the door frame of Melena's bedroom. He enveloped her in a hug from behind and kissed her lightly on the neck. She turned in his arms. "I never expected this," she said simply, her voice oddly calm.

"Most people don't expect something like this to happen to them."

"Not just this, Jack, the whole thing. If someone would have told me twelve years ago that me and my husband, the bug guy at the lab, would be trying to recover our kidnapped daughter, I would have laughed at them. I was never the type of person who planned on settling down - getting married and having kids. It's just not me."

His optimism was raised just by holding her in his arms, and he gave her a grin. "Life has a way of changing even the best made plans."

Angela took a deep breath. "Honestly, Jack, what do you think the chances are that Mel will come out of this?"

"I know she will."

"No, you don't," she said with a shake of her head. "All you, _all of you,_ are doing is making empty promises. There's no way of knowing that she'll be alright. For all we know, she might already be dead. This thing is already so screwed up that it's stupid to think the chances of it ending well are high."

Jack studied her face closely, then swept a piece of hair away from it. "You always used to be the optimistic one."

"And now I'm the realistic one."

"You're being negative."

At this, Angela pulled back from Jack's arms and stepped around him into the hall. "No," she said softly, wiping away the solitary tear that trickled down her cheek. He didn't know what she was talking about, but didn't ask.

Angela flinched and took a step backwards when Jack reached out to her.

"It's going to be okay, Angela."

"When? When is anything_ ever_ going to be okay? In a few hours? Tomorrow? Next week? Because, right now, I'm thinking never." Both anger and despair were splayed across her face, and she didn't bother to hide the tears that were falling.

"As soon as Mel's home safe, you'll feel better."

"And when exactly is that going to happen, huh, Jack?"

"Soon."

"It should have already happened, but it didn't."

"There was nothing we could do about that." Again, he reached out to her, and, again, she pulled away.

"What I find most remarkable about this entire fucked up situation is that you are one of the richest men in the country, yet you can't find out for me where the hell my daughter is, or even if she's alive."

"_Our_ daughter, Angela, you're not going through this alone." He raised his volume to match hers.

"Well, it sure as hell feels like it," Angela practically yelled, turning to walk down the hall.

"I'm sorry," Jack said to her back. "Can't we talk about it?"

"No," she replied coolly through her tears, sparing him only a glance.

"What are you doing?" He asked when she started walking again.

This time, Angela didn't even turn around. "I'm walking away." And she was.

* * *

At the rate she was going, Angela figured she'd be out of charcoal before the sketch was finished. And that was saying something, as she'd just bought a new box a few weeks ago. But between her hand shaking so badly that she seemed to drop every piece she picked up and the brightness of her work, it was disappearing quickly. Then again, she'd never made a habit of finishing the type of thing she was doing now - the spur-of-the-moment, emotion-drenched, lacking-in-definitive-shapes-or-purposes type.

One good thing she could find about living in an estate so huge she was married before she completely knew her way around it, was the ability to find solitude. It was easy to find a room far away from everyone else and everything else. She'd strung extra lights up in the room she was in now years ago, after her and Jack's first real fight as a married couple. After that, it had become her sanctuary for artistic release.

Drawing, sculpting, any form of art, really, was the only way Angela knew how to contain her emotions. And, if not contain them, at least channel them.

She was losing faith in her talent as a person, more specifically, a mother. Melena was still out there, her fate likely not as bleak as Angela made it out to be, and yet Angela was focusing all of her energy fighting with Jack - who, really, just wanted to reassure her - and, now, art. She was not cut out for motherhood, a fact that had crossed her mind when she became pregnant seven years ago, but had come back to hit her full force in the last twenty hours.

Angela quickly swiped away a tear and went back to shading the shapeless blob in front of her.

The paper on her easel looked vaguely familiar, as if she'd done it before, as impossible as that was. She racked her memory, trying to connect it to something. Then something clicked in her head.

It looked so familiar because she'd done almost the exact same thing before. Long before, the morning after her first date with Jack, when she'd had no work to keep her mind occupied. A few days later, Booth had caught sight of it, and commented. She struggled to remember his words.

"_It looks as if you poured your heart out through that pencil. It's dark and uncertain,_" he'd said, before jokingly adding: "_The Squint date didn't go so great, huh?_" At the time, she'd blabbered something about them just not being meant for each other, then gave him the image he'd came for.

But now, she saw the common theme. She'd done something, or was planning to do something she though would be for the good of her relationship with Jack, but ended up being all wrong.

The last time, he'd have to almost die before she would change her mind about them. What would it take this time?

Panicked by her sudden realization, Angela quickly tore the page from the easel, crumpled it, tossed it into the corner, and began to draw something of substance, something real.

* * *

Jack was still pacing, but now in his bedroom. _Their_ bedroom.

Angela's words had stung him deeply, and now he couldn't shake the feeling that the last ten years of his life had been a mistake. Even upset, his wife had always spoken a degree of truth. So if she implied that he was an un-fit father and that she was leaving him, he believed it.

Nine years ago, Jack believed whole-heartedly that he would never care about anyone the way he cared about Angela. Fast-forward nearly three years, and he's the proud parent of a healthy baby girl with her mother's big brown eyes. At the time, he'd jokingly blamed the eyes for the speed he fell for the infant Melena. He'd been scared to death to hold her, for fear of breaking her, and now he was scared to death to lose her.

Over the years, she'd developed a love of finger-painting - a trait Jack was sure his wife had possessed in her youth - and also the ability to throw temper-tantrums at the drop of a hat so fierce it was frightening. The second one, he vocally denied knowing the cause of, thought silently, was proud his daughter was using her temper in an influential way, even at such a young age.

Thinking about Melena knotted his stomach the same way Angela had, so many years ago, before he'd told her how he felt about her. He sat down on the edge of the bed and dropped his head to his hands, resting his elbows on his knees.

Melena had better wind up fine, for the sake of his sanity. Dealing with the loss of someone who directly shared his DNA would be difficult with Angela at his side. If she left, like she seemed liable to do, it would be impossible to recover. Of that, he was certain.

He was in the process of reminding himself he was dealing with ifs, and that the objective scientist should never fret over their reactions to outcomes not certain when Brennan's muffled voice came to him from the living room.

"Angela, Jack, I just got a call from Booth."

* * *

While Brennan and Zach discussed tears of joy and Angela gave an excellent demonstration, Jack tried to process what Brennan had just shared with them. Booth and his team had found the location of the kidnapper and his victim. During the raid, Booth hadn't thought twice about shooting the perpetrator when he waved his firearm around. Melena was safe; Booth wouldn't let her out of his arms until she was home, which would happen in a matter of minutes.

Suddenly, the future seemed brighter. Jack sat beside Angela on the couch, where she'd promptly dropped and burst into tears when they heard the news. He wrapped one arm around her and leaned in close.

"I love you," he whispered, never meaning the words more. It was entirely possible she hadn't heard him, so, in his happiness, he passed her non-reaction off as miscommunication rather than ignorance.

Angela seemed unable to speak for a few moments, but when she looked at Jack, her eyes - those gorgeous deep brown eyes that had made he feel so many different things over the years - were shining, both with tears and relief.

"She's okay," she finally managed. "Our little Mel's safe."

"I know." Jack was fairly certain that emotions as strong as he was feeling was the cause of spontaneous human combustion. Through both laughter and tears, he and Angela decided the best course of action would be to be waiting outside when Booth arrived with Melena.

So that's where they were. When Booth's dark SUV stopped in front of the main doors, Angela couldn't get the passenger's door open fast enough. The little girl inside tumbled quickly into her mother's arms and allowed herself to be scooped up into a tight embrace. Jack let mother and daughter bond for a minute before taking Melena into his own arms.

"How's my little princess?" He asked, barely able to contain his happiness.

"She's home now," Melena answered matter-of-factly, her humour causing her dad her hug her even tighter. He knew that the events of the last day would leave deep emotional scars on the child, but, for right now, he was just glad to have her safe.

Angela, finished thanking Booth to the blushing point, came back to Jack and Melena. He used one arm to pull his wife towards him, thankful to be holding the two loves of his life. The parents simultaneously coddled the child until the child yawned, reminding the world of the hour.

"I bet you're tired, aren't you, sweetie?" Angela asked, pushing a piece of hair from her daughter's eyes and receiving a sleepy nod in response. "I think you should have a quick bath before bed."

"Mommy," Melena argued, stretching out the 'o'.

"No arguing," Angela teased as Jack set Melena on to the ground. "Mommy would just feel better if you were nice and squeaky clean."

"Children don't squeak."

"That's because they're not clean enough," Jack interjected, laughing. He watched Angela lead Melena upstairs, presumably to a warm bubble-filled bath that she adored so much, then joined the still-large crowd in the living room. Thank-yous were in order.

* * *

By the time Jack had the house empty and was upstairs, Melena was finished her bath, and was getting tucked into bed. Angela and Brennan had spent an hour attacking it earlier with cleaning supplies, removing the residue the crime scene unit had left.

Jack watched from the doorway as Angela tucked Melena snuggly beneath her favourite purple sheet set, then kissed her on the forehead, wished sweet dreams, and offered to turn on a nightlight. Melena accepted the nightlight, but vowed she would never be able to fall asleep alone. Jack knew Angela caved instantly, even though she put on a show of thinking about it. She perched herself on the edge of the bed until her daughter was sound asleep, which didn't take long.

When Angela was certain Melena was asleep, she gently lowered her lips to her forehead again, whispered something, and crept out of the room.

"She seems to be doing well," she told Jack as she partially shut the door behind her. "You were right, everything turned out okay."

"Does that mean that we're okay, too?" Now that one of the most important things in the world to him was safe, he could focus on the other one.

"I don't know," Angela responded. "Does it?"

"It'd better."

All of a sudden, she was in his arms, crying. "I'm so sorry, Jack. We suffered the worst day of our lives together, and I hardly even talked to you, and when I did, it was to critize you. I'm so sorry," she repeated, her head resting on his shoulder.

Jack hushed her. "It's alright, Ange, don't apologise. I deserved what ever hell you gave me."

He felt Angela shake her head. "No, you didn't."

"How about we forget today ever happened and go to bed?"

"That would be more than alright with me."

Later, after both the making and the re-confirmation of love, Angela fell asleep in Jack's arms. He lay awake, partially wondering what hour Melena would be waking them tomorrow. Hopefully, she would be tired enough to let them stay in bed. But if not, he doubted he would care very much. The other part of his brain was focused entirely on Angela. For someone who rarely believed in luck and coincidence, Jack was certain he was the luckiest man alive. In a twenty-four hour span, he'd come so close to losing all that mattered to him, but had ended up keeping it, and loving them both a hundred times more than he ever though possible.


End file.
